Since their controversial inceptions—controversial not just for their sound or aesthetic, but also in ongoing debates about their origin stories—punk and hip-hop have received significant scholarly attention as objects of study. As insurgent and often incoherent sets of scenes emerging in the 1970s, and in the aftermath of multiple, devastating anti-imperial wars and a global economic restructuring, punk and hip-hop manifested all the contradictions of modernist avant-garde movements—unsentimental and romantic, revolutionary and reactionary, a draw for queers and freaks and the worship of male genius.

And yet rarely are the two brought into conversation with each the other. This symposium stages productive conversations across hip hop and punk feminisms, including questions about the genealogies and as well multiple origin stories for hip hop and punk across diasporas and the globe (against a wholly distinct and discrete genealogy, or singular origin story, for each); about the theories of aesthetics and value that emerge from hip hop and punk cultures, including forms of immanent critique as well as political polemic that imagine futurity or negativity, and the uses and challenges to them from women of color feminisms; and about the ephemeral and haptic qualities of hip hop and punk performances, including the events, actions, and encounters between bodies that shape social and cultural formations within hip hop and punk cultures.